Just For You: Happy Stranger’s Day

August needs something to perk it up. Some Christians celebrate the Feast of the Assumption on August 15th. Jews fast on Tisha B’Av, but it doesn’t even qualify as a parking holiday in New York City. This year, August coincides with Ramadan, so Muslims are feasting and fasting, but Ramadan moves all around the Western calendar.

Stranger’s Day has the potential to be the greatest holiday of all, not least for the greeting-card industry. On all other holidays, you send cards only to those people you know, but the number of people you don’t know is in the billions.

Potential is only potential, and we can’t exploit it without your help. Here’s Roz with another idea for how to celebrate Stranger’s Day:

Hello, stranger. We haven’t been properly introduced, and hopefully we never will be. I’ve got lots of friends—actual ones, and also all these other people that Facebook says are my friends. But even though we may never befriend each other, or even “friend” each other, that doesn’t mean we can’t exchange presents. Here are some items I wouldn’t mind giving to you, stranger, on this very special day:

You can help us by posting pictures of stuff you’d like to give away to the Stranger’s Day Flickr group or on Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram, using the tag #strangersday. We’ll look through the options and post pictures of the ones that we’d most like to receive from a stranger. You can also visit the Stranger’s Day site, and tell others to do the same.